(End of the American Dream)—Every inch of our planet is being watched, and incredibly sophisticated “artificial intelligence solutions” make it possible for those that are watching our planet to find whatever they want in just minutes. You can try to run, and you can try to hide, but if they really want to find you it won’t be very difficult. All around us, a global surveillance prison is being constructed. Even if you completely stay off the Internet and you totally avoid all forms of modern technology, cameras and satellites will still be endlessly watching you. And once your face has been identified, artificial intelligence can be used to locate you wherever you pop up on the entire planet.
Corey Jaskolski is the CEO of an artificial intelligence company known as Synthetaic, and the system that his company has developed is extremely impressive.
According to NPR, it “really can find anything you want anywhere in the world”…
BRUMFIEL: AI has been getting attention for its potential to bring huge changes to lots of different fields in the near future, but the AI revolution in surveillance is happening now. For decades, cameras have been watching over cities, businesses and even homes. But that footage has mainly been stored locally, and reviewing it took a pair of human eyes. Not anymore. AI systems can now hunt for a van in a city, scan license plates and even faces in real time. The system being developed by Synthetaic has many possible uses. An environmental group, for example, is trying to use it to track large livestock operations globally to monitor greenhouse gas emissions. Synthetaic’s system really can find anything you want anywhere in the world.
JASKOLSKI: We’ve run searches, as an example, across the entire eastern seaboard of Russia for ships, and we can find every ship in a few minutes. It’s pretty remarkable.
BRUMFIEL: Being able to scan the vast coastline of a nation like Russia is why this kind of technology has caught the eye of big government intelligence agencies. Watching everything that needs to be watched has always been a labor-intensive business. Even in George Orwell’s famous novel “1984,” the all-seeing thought police struggled to keep up.
In the wrong hands, such technology could potentially be used to enforce tyranny on a scale never seen before in all of human history.
I wanted to learn more about Synthetaic, and so I went to their official website, and I discovered that they recently announced “a five-year strategic partnership agreement with Microsoft”…
Synthetaic, a leading provider of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, and has announced a five-year strategic partnership agreement with Microsoft aimed at revolutionizing AI data and cloud solutions. As part of this agreement, Microsoft is providing Synthetaic access to nearly 1 million hours (about 114 years) of cloud compute resources. This strategic collaboration will unlock a new era of possibilities in computer vision and data analysis, with a wide range of benefits across defense and intelligence, commercial, and non-government agency applications.
This partnership will help significantly accelerate innovation with Synthetaic’s key product, the Rapid Automatic Image Categorization (RAIC) tool. RAIC, built on Microsoft Azure, enables unparalleled search capabilities through automated data labelling, allowing for the exploration of massive global datasets, without the need for pretraining or structuring. RAIC was instrumental in the tracing of suspected Chinese balloon flights through 18 trillion pixels of Earth observation imagery without a pretrained model using a rough sketch and unlabeled data.
Most people don’t even know that this sort of surveillance technology exists.
And now AI has made it possible for the watchers to seamlessly connect everything that we do online to everything that we do offline…
However, with the advance of the internet and the increased reliance on it to perform many of our daily activities, governments and other commercial companies can monitor everything we do online and connect it – using different ways – to our real identity, creating a complete profile for every internet user. For example, our online purchases, search queries we submit to search engines, social connections, geographical locations we visit, and anything we do online can be recorded and traced back to our real identity.
AI surveillance will allow interested parties to exploit the power of AI to collect and analyze the tremendous volume of data available online and connect it to each person.
However, it is worth noting that surveillance is not limited to people’s online activities; we mean what people do on the internet. For instance, surveillance cameras powered by AI technology can recognize individuals’ faces quickly and track them across the city.
Like I said, there is nowhere to run and there is nowhere to hide. Of course most of us willingly hand them vast troves of personal information about ourselves anyway.
And the big tech companies are always searching for new ways to extract even more…
Facebook recently rolled out a new “Link History” setting that creates a special repository of all the links you click on in the Facebook mobile app. You can opt out if you’re proactive, but the company is pushing Link History on users, and the data is used for targeted ads. As lawmakers introduce tech regulations and Apple and Google beef up privacy restrictions, Meta is doubling down and searching for new ways to preserve its data harvesting empire.
The company pitches Link History as a useful tool for consumers “with your browsing activity saved in one place,” rather than another way to keep tabs on your behavior. With the new setting you’ll “never lose a link again,” Facebook says in a pop-up encouraging users to consent to the new tracking method. The company goes on to mention that “When you allow link history, we may use your information to improve your ads across Meta technologies.” The app keeps the toggle switched on in the pop-up, steering users towards accepting Link History unless they take the time to look carefully.
Needless to say, this isn’t just happening on the Internet.
These days, most new vehicles are systematically collecting information about you…
If you own an EV or a “digital car,” you better watch what you say because you might be under total surveillance, and that goes for your passengers as well. What? Your data will be sold, too? Yep. Multiple times to multiple companies. However, there is an easy opt-out fix: “Never buy them, drive them, sit in them, or exist on the street when they drive by.”
When you go to purchase a new vehicle, be very careful to read the fine print.
For example, just check out what anyone that buys a new Subaru is agreeing to…
Here’s something you might not realize. The moment you sit in the passenger seat of a Subaru that uses connected services, you’ve consented to allow them to use — and maybe even sell — your personal information. According to their privacy policy, that means things like your name, location, “Audio recordings of Vehicle Occupants”, and inferences they can draw about things like your “characteristics, predispositions, behavior, or attitudes.” Call us bonkers, but we don’t think that simply sitting in the passenger seat of someone’s Subaru should mean you consent to having any of your personal information use for, well, pretty much anything at all. Let alone potentially sold to data brokers or shared with third party marketers so they can target you with ads about who knows what based on the the inferences they draw about you because you sat in the back seat of a Subaru in the mountains of Colorado. We’re gonna really call out Subaru for this, because they lay it out so clearly in their privacy policy, but please know, Subaru isn’t the only car company doing this sort of icky thing.
Wow.
We have reached a stage where virtually everything that we do is monitored and put in a database somewhere.
And with each passing day, the surveillance prison that is being constructed all around us become even more intrusive.
So where is all of this ultimately going?
We might want to think about that, because we are moving into one of the most chaotic periods in all of human history.
There is so much potential for AI surveillance tools to be abused, and tyranny is on the rise all over the globe.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.